On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 05/17/24 (SAB121 repeal, Paul Ryan on stables, Bitcoin ETF 13Fs) (EP.528)

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: The Senate votes to repeal SAB121 Which Democrats defied Biden on SAB121? Chuck Schumer breaks with Warren Paul Ryan's pro-stablecoin comments on Bloomberg CME is launching a spot crypto exchange The State of Wisconsin owns over $100m of Bitcoin ETFs Pump.fun exploited MEV exploiters arrested by the DoJ What's up with Roaring Kitty? Content mentioned in this episode: Matt Hougan, Who's Buying Bitcoin ETFs (According to 13F Filings) David Morris, What President Biden's Crypto Politics Might Really Be About Rep Mike Flood and Wiley Nickel, It's time to overturn SAB 121 Sponsor notes: Bitcoin's Halving Aftermath In Coin Metrics' State of the Network issue 259, we analyze the impact of Runes and miner revenues in Bitcoin's post-halving landscape

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated easing. You've printed a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the... of Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. For this Metrics Minute, we're diving into the aftermath of Bitcoin's fourth halving. The halving block, which is block 840,000, that generated a record 4.7 million in minor revenue, driven by surging transaction fees, and the race to secure the Epic Sat, which is the first Satoshi

mind after the Having. After a three-day bidding war, the Epic sat, I wasn't even aware of this, sold for 33 billion, 33 Bitcoins. What? Making that block the most valuable batch of transactions in Bitcoin's entire history. The Rooms Protocol also launched alongside the having, triggering a surge of operand transactions. There are 800,000 of those on April 23. Since the launch of Ruins, miners have earned 2,000 Bitcoin via ruins. About half of those were within 24 hours of the halving. Minor revenue per megawatt now sits at $1.3,000 per megawatt, which is actually the lowest levels since the FDX collapsed in 2022.

Kind of mixed bag on the halving. That's a lot to pay for a set. Yeah, I mean, I don't understand that. What is what's the significance of the set? it's just the first sad after the having i mean comes around every four years right that's like a very pure nfti i mean it's literally just a utxo with no nothing else attached and how do you showcase it would you have that like on a on a wall yeah you can't even visually represent it that's like you can't put it in a gallery i don't know something i'm missing here well this is

is a big day here. So Sab 121, I guess we'll talk about this at length in this podcast, but Sab 121 has passed the Senate with 60 votes. I think this is one of the most momentous days in the history of this podcast. Pretty great. No one has talked about Sab 112 more than us. I think that's fair to say. I'm really excited about it. And this is the first piece of dedicated crypto legislation that's ever passed both chambers, right? It is. And it's our pet issue, Sab 1-2-1, which I think the way most people found out about it was probably this show. I'm not to get too big for our britches here.

I mean, if you think I'm tired of talking about it, you would be wrong. I love talking about it. I don't know when it first came up, but when we first brought it up, I never thought it would spiral into this massive issue where now you have Senate Democrats directly defying Biden, and Biden threatening a veto on this very niche and esoteric rule from the SEC. I mean, it should be the most bipartisan thing in the world. It just protects consumers. You allow regulated banks to play in this market.

What is controversial about that? Yeah, and if you think about it from the perspective of a Democrat that's pro-regulation, pro-overside of the crypto markets, pro-consumer protection, it doesn't make sense to be against sub one-to-one, because it allows the largest and most sophisticated and, in theory, most sort of government surveillable banks to engage in crypto custody, as opposed to the current motley crew of firms that do it. So this rule doesn't actually seem hostile to sort of like your mainline democratic agenda.

The reasons for not liking this would be, number one, you just want to kill the industry, which is, I think, Elizabeth Warren. or number two, you run an offshore unregulated brokerage crypto casino and maybe you just don't want competition. So the vote passed, it was 60, past the Senate, 60 to 38, right? Yes, 60 to 38. So who didn't vote? I actually don't know. There were two absentees.

People not there, I guess. So the Democrats voted to overturn it. So to openly defy Biden were senators Casey, Peters, Jillibrand, Mark Kelly, Hickenlooper, Cory Booker, Tester, Rosen, Creson, Sinema, Lujan, Ron Wyden, and Chuck Schumer. The second ranking senator, Chuck Schumer. That's very interesting. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's huge. He's the majority leader, right? Yeah, I mean, defying Warren, defying Biden.

this is a break in Democratic ranks. I think that's fair to say. So this was fascinating because right before the House vote, an hour before the House vote, Biden came out and said that he would veto this. And so he's discouraging House Democrats from voting for it. Didn't slow down a number of them. So a number of House Democrats voted for this last week. And then apparently Schumer earlier this week said,

vote your conscience to the Democrats. And a lot of them actually have a conscience, it turns out. Now, you can argue around the motivation, because some of these Democrats might have said, look, I'm in a tight race. So Tester would be a good example there. Tester's in Montana. He's super hostile to crypto, super hostile digital assets. People should be really rallying to get Tester beat in the next election, I would argue.

But he voted for this. And probably because, look, he's in a tight race. He's probably going to lose. It's going to be a lot of money flowing into that campaign because his opponent is a big fan of digital assets. And he probably said, look, Biden's just going to veto this anyway. so why do I need the headache? Yeah, it actually makes sense from that perspective. It's a relatively low risk thing to do.

You imagine Biden will probably follow through the veto. And you can show that you're actually kind of thoughtful on crypto, at least this issue. You know who I really like in all this is Wiley Nicol, who's a Democrat out of, he's in the House in North Carolina. Apparently he's not running again, which is a shame. But he just seems empowered to say what he thinks. So he has come out very publicly. So he's written a letter to the SEC decrying this whole ruling, which was unconstitutionally issued.

He also wrote an op-ed with Mike Flood, who's a Republican from Nebraska in Blackworks. It's called It's Time to Overturn Sub-121. So he's really shining here. It's too bad that he's going away from elected office. Yeah, we're going to put that in the show notes. We also have a very interesting piece of commentary from another former politician, week, Paul Ryan, his diatribe on Bloomberg. Paul Ryan, yeah.

That caught a lot of attention on crypto Twitter. My goodness. So we'll get into that one. Why don't we do some deals of the week to start off? First one up is chain ML. This is a research organization building at the intersection of AI and blockchain, which is just a great intersection these days if you're trying to get in the deals of the week.

They raised 6.2 million from HackVC, Forsy, Hypersphere, and Figment. Next up, we have Zeta markets. There are Solana Decks. There is $5 million from electric capital, DACM, and Salini Capital. Then we have Highley. I think this has an accent ague on it, Halle. This is a zero-knowledge proof company that raised $2.6 million from framework and fabric. Next up, ArchLabs.

They are a Bitcoin native application platform. There is $7 million from multi-coin, Portaventures, Ogex, big brain holdings, and our friends at CMS. Then it's Zest, which is a Bitcoin lending protocol that raised $3.5 million from Tim Draper, Binance, flow traders, and trust machines. Then we have a monster deal, which is Polly Market. There, of course, the crypto-based prediction market,

there is $45 million from Founders Fund. Big congrats to Shane and the team over there. That's a big fundraise there. Next one up is RCIM. This is a confidential computing network that raised 5.5 million from Greenfield, Coinbase, Heartcore, and Longhash. Then we have Humanity Protocol, their decentralized identity protocol. There raised 30 million from Kingsway, Anamoka, blockchain.com, and hashed.

Then it's Anomily, an AI blockchain gaming studio that raised 1.5 million from Shima. Then we have Raven, their proprietary trading firm. There is 2.7 million from HackVC and Wintermute. Next one is a company called Cross the Air. A crypto gaming company that raised 3.5 million from Anamoka. What a name. Then we have GAMIC, a decentralized social company. There is 1.8 million from Binance Labs and Polygon Ventures.

Here's an insurance one, Rhee, which is a blockchain reinsurance company, raised 14 million from Tribe and Morgan Creek Digital. And lastly, we have Shogun, their DeFi trading protocol. There is 6.9 million from Pollychain, Arrington, and Hypersphere. So we talked about Sab 121 at the outset here, but I guess the question is, so this has passed the Senate in not a veto-proof way, I would add. So you need two-thirds, I believe, of the House and the Senate to overturn a veto. Biden has said he's going to veto. Now, does Biden actually know that he's going to veto this, or is Elizabeth Warren's staff, who now works for Joe Biden in the driver's seat?

Is this guy actually going to veto this bill? He's got Chuck Schumer on the other side of this that is telling him that he's in support. of it. So the American people, the representatives of the American people want the banks to be able to custody digital assets. Yeah, you'd think to overturn the first piece of crypto legislation passed in a bipartisan way in a very contested Congress. You would want a really good reason to do that. And vetoing this doesn't at all seem to be a meaningful agenda item for Biden. It's not, Biden didn't come out at any point say this is one of the objectives of my presidency. Seems really, really weird to use up political capital on this.

Of course, he can do it if he wants. But it's just an odd move to veto something like this. I was talking to someone today about Wiley Nickel, who we just talked about, but I've come to have a lot of respect for him, never met the man. But clearly is speaking out of step with the core progressive wing of the Democratic party. And, you know, this person said, look, Wiley Nicol has the president's ear. And so maybe maybe that's true. What I said back was it's not like Biden has three years. I mean, Elizabeth Warren has one of them and Sherrod Brown has the other one. It's kind of how it looks.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's clear to us now that a lot of the staffing, especially on the financial regulatory side in the Biden admin, was informed by, I guess, this compromise to give Elizabeth with war and a lot of discretion there in exchange for the support of the progressive wing of the party. But as crypto becomes an electoral issue, like, you have to imagine there's some kind of, there's some junior staffers within the Biden admin that are wondering, is it really prudent to die on this specific hill, especially when it's such a straightforward piece of legislation? Yeah, I mean, you have, John Donenberg is really the key.

antagonist here. So he's the deputy director of the National Economic Council at the White House. So he's an advisor to Biden. You might say, well, this guy must have a very storied career. I mean, he must really be experienced if he's directing Joe Biden's whole economic agenda. What did he do before this? Was he a big executive at a financial services company? He must know a lot about the economy. But it turns out his last two jobs were chief of staff to Senator Elizabeth Warren for about three years and then policy director and senior advisor to Warren for president campaign for two years before that. So I would argue that this is the guy who's pulling all the strings and the person who's behind him telling him what to do is actually Senator Elizabeth Warren. I'm really sick of her

agenda setting policy at the top levels here. I mean, it is remarkable how much influence she has with very limited pushback from the Biden admin and it's been very destructive. in every single way, it's not just crackdowns on crypto, it's misbehavior at the FDIC. And of course, now she's protecting the embattled Gronberg at the FDIC, who I think was testifying today. That's affected not just crypto, but fintech as well. So it's all kinds of financial regulation has gone haywire under her stewardship in this country. Well, we were with someone who's running against her last night, Ian Kane, hopefully next senator from Massachusetts. So he is stanchly in favor of pulling back this sub 121, passing the market

structure bill, passing the stable coin bill. So hopefully we can get some momentum behind some of these people that are running races against some of the folks that are just blocking innovation in the United States here. So it does seem like a split is emerging within the Democratic camp, at least. So even if this sab repeal doesn't go through, still I would say really encouraging development, especially with Chuck Schumer. Do you want to talk about Paul Ryan's comments? Yeah, so this was last Friday. I didn't notice it until yesterday.

And I think we're going to actually play them in full. So let's pause here and let Paul Ryan speak. This is on a Bloomberg interview. And the question was about the debt and how the U.S. can tackle it. He had this to say. I think there's a couple of things Congress could do. They're not, but maybe they'll get something done. I think stable coin legislation would be a good step in the right direction.

That could be helpful. That could be done this year. But I don't see anything other than that on the horizon. Let's talk about stable coin, because I've heard you say that actually getting legislation on that could help treasury auctions. And when you said it, I said, what's the connection there? Take us through, take our audience through that connection. Yeah, so stable coins, which are digital private sector dollar-back currencies, it's not crypto because it's tethered to the US dollar, they have to have our backed assets. They have to

have treasuries or cash to back them stable coins. There's not a law that governs these right now. So there aren't really deployed. But if you actually have a law, which actually McKinney and Chair Waters, Maxine Waters and McKinry are putting a deal together. Schumers and talks with them. I think there's a reasonable chance they could get a deal on stable coin legislation. that means you have a legal framework team which you have stable coins deployed you'd go from a couple hundred billion dollars of stable coins to you know maybe trillions right now staple points are like the 16th largest buyer of bonds bills and notes among all sovereigns if you actually regulate stable points having deployed that does two things that gets the u.s dollar more deeply ingrained

in the oncoming digitization of currencies that's a good thing and you create new consumers demand for our bonds because they have to have those to back up the stable coins. So more demand for treasuries, more use of a digital dollar throughout the system to help better entrench the dollar. It's a win-win situation for America. I think it's a no-brainer. I'm hopeful, cautiously optimistic Congress might do that this year still. Now, hopefully our editor played that in a way that it's not playing right now as I'm speaking. So, yeah, I made a slight mistake with the editing last week. I got a few comments about that.

I made some really positive comments about Ryan Selkis that never made it to air for a lot of people. No, I fixed it. You fixed it in post, but I think once it gets into the player and download it, people don't get it. Yeah, that's right. So Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House,

he's actually only 54. It's very young. And he seems to be exceptionally well-informed. about stable coins. And there are a few things that are notable. First of all, someone who's so well regarded and occupied a very senior position in Congress being so clear right about stable coins, that alone is striking. That's not necessarily a topic he has to be educated on. So it's interesting that he is. Also, the fact that he just brought up stable coins spontaneously in response to a question about the debt. It could have said anything.

said get our levels of spending down or, you know, cut entitlements or spend less on foreign military engagements or something like that or cut interest rates. But he brought up stable coins. And of course, the point is that stable coins are a large and growing buyer of the debt. So I found that really notable. And he repeated a talking point that we came up with. 16th largest holder, right? Yeah, so that traces back to, I guess, presentation, a presentation of made a Missouri that I believe was the first time. And so, yeah, it's still the case if you run the numbers today.

Stable coins collectively are the 16th largest holder of treasuries if you count them among the sovereigns. And they would be considered the 14th largest U.S. money market mutual fund. So it kind of underscores the size of the stable coin market. Yeah, it's great to see Paul Ryan. and come out and actually say things like this because a lot of people listen to Paul Ryan. He's very, very smart on policy issues. I believe he has a job now in private equity or venture capital.

So he's on our side of the table, I suppose, but still very plugged into all of these issues. One interesting thing he said also positioning wise was he said, stable coins are not crypto, that they're kind of, he really sought to distinguish stable coins from kind of liquid crypto. It kind of makes sense positioning-wise. I mean, crypto still has bad reputation in DC. And so he's kind of drawing a distinction saying, no, no, no, these things are backed by dollars.

They're legit. So I've noticed a tonal shift happening. That's why I wrote that piece on Medium recently. And this really exemplifies it. I mean, hopefully he has the air of some of his former colleagues as well. Yeah, don't call them crypto dollars. They're definitely not crypto dollars. I don't know who would have come up with that.

that yeah no they're just they're just dollars that just so happened to the liability to circulate on chain so we we put out this newsletter every friday and i haven't gotten any comments to this effect but i've felt that there's generally been just a lot of bad news lately and this week is one that there's a lot of good news and so sab 121 goes away you have the paul ryan comments and then this is just a super interesting development so the cmee group according to the financial times they're looking to launch a spot cryptocurrency market in the United States. So right now they have futures, obviously, but they are looking to do this in the spot sense, which that is a huge development.

That is a monster, monster company has a tremendous market share in derivatives. Now moving into the spot market, and you'd imagine that this just opens up the product capabilities. So clients who are able to access the derivatives market, may be able to cross margin against spot. It seems like they have the tech to do this. internally from a matching engine perspective and going to be pairing up with some prime brokers to do it, it seems like. So big, big development. I don't think people appreciate how big of a deal

this is. Yeah, that's really exciting to see. I hadn't even, I wasn't even aware of that before you just said it. Well, and it's, it's interesting because one of CME's competitors is CBO and they pulled the plug on their spot market like two weeks ago. And everyone's like, oh, you know, big institutions throwing in the towel. It looks like it's just a failure to execute on the CBO side. But And CME, that's a super, super well-run company. So I'm really excited to see where that goes. And Coinbase stock is down on the news. It's not like an imminent launch.

It's kind of interesting to see Coinbase stock react like that. On the institutional front as well, more of these 13Fs rolled in. And as usual, the Bloomberg boys, they're always coming up with new records that the Bitcoin ATFs are setting that I'd never even thought. of before and apparently this is another one that i bet and fbt and f btc have more institutional holders than you know they could have ever expected after a few months of existence according to these 13 f's the really notable one was the state of wisconsin they bought 99 million dollars worth of um the i shares bitcoin etf yeah so is it worth like 167 million now or something like that so they have a

a big position. So north of $100 million worth of Bitcoin being held by the state of Wisconsin right now. So that was a big one. The other big one, there was a firm up here in Boston called Bracebridge. That was big in the Argentinian debt crisis trade. They're big into this. Millennium has over $800 million worth of spot.

So Millennium is like 7% of the Fidelity Bitcoin ETF. I think there's something like 2% of the Bitwise one. They also hold the gray scale one in the, BlackRock one. Now, you look at state of Wisconsin and you say, that's very likely a long, right? They're holding this on a long-term basis. With Millennium, it's a pod shop. And so frequently, I think you'd have offsetting short positions. It's unlikely to me that Millennium would just be $800 million long Bitcoin as part of their strategy. So, you know, people made the initial comment, well, that's, you know, like sell pressure coming to these products at some point. Millennium's

not going to hold that for like a 10x, but I don't really read it that way. I think it's just another tool for them to use in their overall investment strategy. It is refreshing, though, that we now have much more of a sense of who, from an institutional perspective, is interested in Bitcoin. I mean, you remember in 2020 and 2021 when people started getting interested again, the only way you'd find out would be because they'd write a shareholder letter quarterly update or something and say, we like Bitcoin, we think there's debt crisis. And there's a handful of funds that did that. Now there's too many to count. There's just dozens and dozens. Tons of them. Tons of them. Well, you know who's not holding it right now is Vanguard, but they have a new CEO came over from

BlackRock where he helped launch the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF. So interested to see what Vanguard is up doing in this space. Probably nothing, but interesting that their new leader actually is pro-Bitcoin. So there's also been a fair amount of turmoil this week. Just as we went to press here, it looks like pump. fun, which is the engine to create meme coins on Solana primarily was exploited for $80 million, apparently. And allegedly, this is just coming out on Twitter, so it's not necessarily confirmed. is a disgruntled former employee exploited the protocol. Is that right? Wow.

So how much? What's the exploit? It appears to be $80 million. $80 million. Wow. That is a, so Pump. That fun,

I guess a lot of people won't be familiar with this. This is a, I guess a startup that just helps you launch meme coins, right? It seems like they've been very successful over the past few months. There's a lot of meme coins being launched. There are a lot of meme coins. Thousands a day. So that's a big exploit.

We also had news this week that two brothers, one is in Boston, one is in New York, have been arrested by the U.S. Department of Justice over, I guess I would classify this as a M.EV-related exploit. So there was a, it's just not your garden variety, maximal extractable value exploit on Ethereum. It seems like there was a kind of a false signature. It seems like it was criminal. I, you know, they stole $25 million from participants in this trading scheme. I don't really know what this means for MEV in general, but it seems like these guys, if this is true, committed to crime. Yeah, so this is very, very interesting. So this dates back to, I remember the tweet threads about this exploit were back in April 2023.

And this was an exploit of MEV bots, of other MVP bots. So this isn't straightforward MV extraction. They basically tricked other MV bots and made a fair amount of money doing this. I'm apparently $25 million plus. I'm very surprised that the DOJ has the level of sophistication to understand this in its entirety. Yes, agreed. It's super complicated. And I guess the question is, what does this mean for sort of standard MEPV searching?

Like, is reordering transactions on Ethereum to give Dex traders' worst execution? Is that also a crime? These guys were charged with wire fraud, I think. So the question is, is sort of generic MV bad? or was there something special about this, that they're exploiting these other MEP bots that means that MEP itself is sort of okay? You got to love the way the U.S. Justice Department describes Ethereum

as a decentralized network that nobody controls. Do you think that someone from that office could maybe walk down the street to the SEC's headquarters and say this is what we think Ethereum is? It is not a security. It's a network that nobody controls. It's run by a decentralized group of actors. Yeah, I had to juggle with the irony of the DOJ protecting the integrity of the Ethereum network

by going after these entities that were exploiting other MEV bots. It's kind of funny because it's like, I'm not very sympathetic to MEV researchers. I mean, by definition, you're making money by giving people worse execution. So user hostile behavior. At some point, I don't know how to think about the regulation of, MEV because this is something that exists in a trad-Fi context with like payment for order flow and things like that. So there is a market structure that has evolved over time in the equity world. And, you know, there's going to be MEV on these blockchains. So I don't know how it gets regulated.

Here's my prediction. I don't think MEV searchers will continue to be US-based. Of course, MEV is going to happen because fundamentally anyone can read. and right to the blockchain. But I think it'll be confined to places in the long term than not the U.S. I do think this is actually going to strike some fear into the MAB researchers. Yeah, because what kind of MV is actually illegal? What kind is really extract? I don't know.

The line between what these guys did and just a generic kind of front running is a little tricky. I mean, they did have the false signature, is being alleged, which I think is the crux of the case. But maybe we'll do some episodes on how to regulate defy in the future, because that's a much, much trickier one. So another case, of course, a Dutch court has sentenced Alexei Pertsov, who's the co-founder of Tornado Cash, to 64 months in prison. I don't think that's altogether too surprising.

But there's a lot of dismay on the timeline around that one as well. Yeah, a lot of people upset about that one. Did you see Sam Tribuko wrote a statement to the judge that will be sentencing Ryan Salem, urging leniency? Yeah, so that's the first we've heard from Trubuko really since the dissolution of FDX, right? Yeah, I think people generally think he's living in parts that are known. I guess I probably shouldn't say. But yeah, it clearly cut a deal with the DOJ. Yeah, I mean, this implies that he might have been a whistleblower or collaborating or something like that.

I still don't understand how he got off scot-free. That doesn't make sense to me. There are a lot of loose ends in the FDX situation. Someone will write investigative journalism pieces around things like toy ventures and some of these affiliated entities. There's a lot of open questions. A lot of open questions around who knew what, when on the inside of FTCS. What about the parents from hell, you know?

Yeah. Barbara Free. and Joe Bankman, I mean, what about the campaign finance violations? What about the Chinese bribe? Bribes, yeah. I mean, this stuff is still unresolved. Very, yeah, very troubling. So a couple pieces that I enjoyed this week, David Morris wrote a piece,

what President Biden's crypto politics might really be about. Thought that was an interesting one. We'll put the link to it in our newsletter. David Morris has also had good coverage of emails from same bank between Sam Bankman for its parents regarding their apparent directions to disseminate various political contributions which appear quite damning my opinion oh for sure I mean especially the mother right I mean she was clearly directing Alameda and FTCS funds via Sam and his cabal of lunatic executives.

So there's a lot going on there. Next up we have Matt Hogan of Bitwise. He put out a piece analyzing the 13Fs, the Bitcoin ATF filings. Yeah, this is really just the gift that keeps on giving. I guess the deadline to file the 13Fs was yesterday. The other dynamic with the 13Fs is that you will have some funds that know that they need to file 13Fs and they get rid of positions like the day before. So this is not conclusive around who has owned these ETFs or who will own them like the day after the 13F filing.

But always interesting to see. His conclusion is that they leave him, quote, incredibly bullish. That's what we like to see. That's what we like to see. Well, it seems like, so right now the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at a new all-time high. Wow. Is that the roaring kitty effect? Do you see this guy?

This guy's back. Yeah. I don't think it's him. I don't either. This guy's, so Roaring Kitty just sent the GameStop to the moon this week. As soon as he tweeted, he came back from, what, three years hiatus on Sunday night. I saw that and I said that stock is going to explode in the morning. And of course it did.

But I don't think it's him either. I mean, this account has just been tweeting memes for the past like three days. Yeah, it's like video clips. It's not really even that interesting. It's really not. I don't understand it at all. I don't understand what this guy's doing, but he's way more powerful than just about anyone in financial services.

So we have to follow up on our commitment last week. We had a contest, which is who are your three favorite desired commencement speakers to talk about Bitcoin, I guess? Yeah. On Warpcast. Yeah. So before I kind of jump into it,

I would recommend. everyone someone just pointed this out to me this week you have to turn off priority mode in your warpcast settings if you actually want to see all of the things that are being said on warpcast and i didn't know so i was seeing a a very small subset of brink nation so apologies to everyone but we got it figured out i see do you want me to roll through some of the submissions here so the the the premise was we are going to be sending merch to whoever submits the best three commencement speakers who could have the Ohio State commencement instead of the guy who went on about ayahuasca and got booed about bitcoin okay not not our best guy no there are other better candidates all right so I'm going to give an

honor two honorable mentions and then we'll do a winner how's that sound yep all right uh Daniel Fernandez honorable mention number one commencement speaker number one Eric Vortes number two John Wu and number three Anita posh I would watch all three of those very very good mission. I think John Wu got the top score. Remember how we're talking about my quiz for back in the day? I think it was him that got the top score on the quiz at like an astonishingly good score. So, shout out to John. And of course, Eric Vortes is the one who I think had a big role in just exposing SBF for the complete phony that he was when he did the, what was it on bankless? He did the debate. One of my favorite podcasts. Really great podcast hosts over there, bankless strong guys.

We're withholding all praise bankless hosts for the next two years. As a bankless premium subscriber, I think those guys are great. And, you know, again, like David, David Hoffman looks like he's. I think they're real intellectuals. Real. And I don't know if they get out of the office very much, but yeah, smart guys. Sure. smart guys strong too climbing climbing mountains and things like that they're climbing mountain all right honor roll mention number two this is a good one uh this is from captain jack uh number one chris dixon number two brian armstrong and number three ryan selkis really good commencement if you can line up any of those three i would say yeah good choices all right our winner our winner is cab calloway he says number one howard lutnik what a that what that's a great one number two

Andreas Antonopoulos and number three, Brian Armstrong, with an honorable mention for Abby Johnson. So he kind of put in four and he probably knew that we're going to be partial to his honorable mention. But he does win because Howard Lutnik and Antonopoulos in particular to me, you pay money to go see these guys. I want to hear more from Howard Lutnik. You know, I want to hear what that guy is to say. Yeah.

Great speaker. Thoughts on stable coins. Go. Thoughts on, seriously. You know, the SEC. please start speaking. And Antonopolis, Antonopolis is just awesome.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've watched Antonopoul hundreds of hours of content that that guy has put out. What does he do now? I don't know. You kind of quit crypto, I think.

I mean, it's just tough to stay on the raging bowl that is the crypto Twitter sphere, right? Like, the guy went through the block size wars. How many? bits of drama has this guy had to deal with. But this guy has single-handedly been responsible for probably more people

understanding how Bitcoin works than almost anyone on planet Earth, I would argue. I think that's true. It is also very draining to be in crypto for any amount of time. So I grant that he may have wanted to reprieve. That guy was he was kind of vitalic like in the sense that he was just always on airplanes, traveling places, evangelizing, just a, really impressive. And his ability to speak eloquently is something that I am envious of. Anyone that can do more than a decade in crypto has my respect. Yeah. I mean, you're,

you're kind of coming up on a decade now. I'm coming up on a decade at the end of this year. Yeah. Yeah. You just got to not blow up. Yeah. You know, you just got to, you got to enjoy it, I guess. All right. So I think that is it for the week. It's going to be an exciting next 10 days here, because that is how long it takes for Joe Bowden to veto this potentially. He can sit on it for 10 days. I was going to ask you that. I was going to ask. 10 days.

So expect something to happen here in 10 days. We'll see. If he's smart from a political perspective, he will not veto this. And I'll also say, it's time for some of these financial institutions that have built out custody to actually have a backbone and come out and say something.

Like Bank of New York Mellon, what are you doing over there? Yeah. This is like a core issue. You could have a really big business. You've hired a bunch of people to build this out. You sent us the onboarding documents. Get out there publicly and actually argue your case here.

I think it's a real shame that some of these institutions that are doing things behind the scenes aren't more public with it. The number one thing that we need is reputable financial institutions to actually come out and say how they feel and actually work. Like do some of the hard work that Fidelity and others have done over. over the years. So I would encourage anyone who works on the inside of one of these behemoths to actually try to have a little bit of a backbone here and fight for what is objectively good for your customers.

Yeah, stick up for yourselves. All right, everyone, that is it. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.